Month: July 2012

I read this from the VOA and would like to share it with my blog visitors:

It was on late Thursday in Zamfara State, Nigeria, a fuel tanker overturned in a road accident and poured its entire contents into a nearby river, potentially impacting the drinking water of millions of people in Zamfara and neighboring Sokoto state. Officials say they currently don’t have the expertise or the equipment to clean up the oil and prevent another health disaster. Nigeria’s Zamfara state is also known for being the site of the worst lead poisoning outbreak in modern history, which is an ongoing crisis. When Mouktar Lugga, the environment commissioner for Zamfara State, arrived on the scene of the fuel spill Friday morning, he saw about ten men standing nearby. They were artisanal gold miners, a mainstay of the local economy. But with 33,000 liters of industrial fuel in the river they couldn’t go to work. Lugga says the tanker accident the previous night left oil slicks the size of two football fields on the river. He says Zamfara has neither the equipment nor the knowledge to clean up the spill and he is hoping the federal government will send technical experts to devise a clean-up plan.